Billions for shelters and lack of responsibility: inspection of bomb shelters revealed a crisis in the civil protection of Ukrainians
The fifth year of a full-scale war testifies to a critical failure in Ukraine’s civil defense system. The presence of a shelter still does not guarantee survival, as out of 66,574 officially registered protective structures, 93% are actually unusable. Instead of real protection for millions of people, the country has thousands of flooded, cluttered or locked premises. While officials, while spending billions of dollars allocated from the state budget for the equipment of shelters, are limited to formal inspections and reports, people continue to die under the walls of blocked shelters. The situation is exacerbated by digital chaos, since a significant part of even functioning facilities are absent from electronic databases and applications, so coordination during an attack is impossible. The inaction of regulatory bodies has turned the rescue of citizens into a lottery, where the price of cynicism and irresponsibility is human lives.
From billion-dollar tenders to closed doors: how much money is allocated for shelter
The results of a large-scale monitoring of civil protection, within the framework of which specialists from the Ombudsman’s office conducted 1,066 detailed inspections in various regions of the country, revealed a deep systemic crisis between financial investments and the real safety of citizens. Out of more than a thousand inspected protective structures, only 80 facilities met the standards and were found to have no serious shortcomings, which indicates a critically low efficiency of the work performed. Commenting on these alarming figures, the Commissioner for Human Rights Dmytro Lubynets emphasized that one of the key problems remains the complete or partial inaccessibility of shelters for people with disabilities. At the same time, the balance sheet holders of the facilities traditionally try to evade responsibility, often explaining the non-compliance with basic inclusive requirements by the chronic lack of proper funding.
Analysis of real cash flows completely refutes the arguments about the shortage of resources, because the total amount of funds allocated from the state and local budgets for the construction, repair and arrangement of shelters for the entire period of the full-scale war is now over 45 billion hryvnias. The process of accumulating these investments was uneven, as the initial figure of 31.3 billion hryvnias reflected net expenditures through the Prozorro electronic procurement system only for the first 1000 days of the war as of the end of 2024, during which more than 46 thousand specialized tenders were held.
The current figures for 2026 turned out to be significantly higher, which is explained by the radical increase in funding for security infrastructure during 2025 and 2026. At the same time, the lion’s share of this capital is distributed through targeted state subventions, aimed mainly at educational institutions, and is also covered by direct expenditures from community budgets.
The geographical structure of investments clearly demonstrates that the distribution of funding directly depends on the level of security risks and financial capacity of specific communities. The ranking of regional leaders in terms of shelter spending is expectedly dominated by Kyiv, which has absorbed 7.2 billion hryvnias. In 2026 alone, the city authorities allocated 2,148,145,000 hryvnias for the construction of new and repair of existing civil defense structures. In 2025, almost the same amount was allocated for construction alone.
Kyiv is followed by the Kyiv region with an indicator of 4.2 billion hryvnias. Next are the front-line and industrial regions with a significant margin: Dnipropetrovsk region spent 3 billion hryvnias, Odessa region – 2.2 billion hryvnias, Kharkiv region – 1.9 billion hryvnias, and Zaporizhia region – 1.6 billion hryvnias. The list is closed by the Lviv region, which is relatively remote from the zone of active hostilities, where the volume of expenditures amounted to 1.1 billion hryvnias.
The state finances the direction of civil defense in schools and kindergartens most systematically and consistently, seeing this as the only way to return children to safe full-time education. State subventions for educational shelters demonstrate a rapid upward trend over the years, which began in 2024, when 2.5 billion hryvnias of targeted subvention were allocated from the state budget. In 2025, the volume of educational subventions increased significantly and amounted to 6.2 billion hryvnias, and in parallel, separate billion-dollar funds were allocated for the rapid installation of mobile shelters. In the current 2026 budget, the government has allocated and is gradually distributing 5 billion hryvnias for the construction of 113 large school shelters, including complex underground schools, and about 1 billion hryvnias for the creation of safe conditions in kindergartens, where the construction of 18 underground shelters is planned.
In addition to domestic funds, a significant part of the shelters are being built at the expense of international donors within the framework of World Bank programs, EU funds, and the large-scale initiative “Coalition of Shelters for Ukraine”. In particular, since the end of 2024 and during 2025–2026, the construction of large fortification storage facilities began to be actively financed with European money through the EU’s Ukraine Facility program. In the first half of last year alone, under this international program, transactions worth 5.3 billion hryvnias were processed through the Prozorro system, which were aimed exclusively at repairs and capital construction of protective structures.
Local community budgets play an important stabilizing role in the implementation of these security projects, as large cities such as Kyiv, Dnipro, Kharkiv and Zaporizhia constantly add billions in co-financing from their own accounts. For example, in Kharkiv and Zaporizhia, the construction of new underground schools and kindergartens is financed under a 50/50 parity scheme or entirely at the expense of city budgets, which forces local authorities to promptly revise their estimates. Constant adjustments and updating of expenditures prove that the financial figures of two years ago do not really reflect the real scale of expenses during the war, but the low quality of shelters with such an excess of resources remains the main challenge for regulatory bodies.
The closed door system: why Ukrainians cannot rely on shelters
The deep systemic crisis of the civil defense infrastructure in Ukraine once again proves that paper reports on the readiness of protective structures are radically different from the harsh reality, where closed or neglected shelters become the cause of irreparable tragedies. The most striking and painful evidence of this administrative negligence was the events in the capital on the night of June 1, 2023, when residents tried to find salvation in the basement of a polyclinic during intense enemy shelling. Blocked by locked doors, people found themselves trapped on the threshold of the facility that was supposed to guarantee their safety, and at that very moment deadly fragments of a downed missile fell nearby.
This incident took the lives of two women and a nine-year-old girl, and also left several injured citizens in its wake, exposing critical gaps in the organization of access to civil defense. Law enforcement agencies later clearly qualified the inaction of the responsible persons, which resulted in a court sentence for the civil guard in the form of 4 years of imprisonment, while separate criminal proceedings were opened against relevant administration officials for official negligence.
Despite the high-profile trials, the chronic nature of the problem is confirmed by the statistics of municipal complaints, because since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Kyiv residents have sent more than 400 official appeals regarding blocked basements and bomb shelters. A sign of the long-term dysfunction of the system was the resonant incident in the Podilskyi district of the capital in November 2025, when a mother and child came across a closed door inside the protective perimeter during an air raid.
The next inspection by the State Emergency Service revealed a specific legal and everyday paradox, since the general entrance to the building turned out to be open, but the internal space was arbitrarily delimited and blocked by local residents for their own needs. The capacity of the city’s shelter network, declared by Kyiv officials, supposedly capable of accommodating 2.7 million people, remains a purely theoretical figure that absolutely does not reflect the real coverage due to geographical and architectural unevenness.
In many residential areas of the capital, the path to the nearest safe place turns into a dangerous time quest lasting more than 10 minutes, which, in the conditions of the use of ballistic weapons, calls into question the very meaning of evacuation. This problem is especially acute within large sectors of private development and in the historical center of the city, where the specifics of dense old architecture did not provide for the integration of protective structures into the foundations of buildings at all. Eyewitness accounts indicate that even officially marked basements on interactive maps often pose a greater threat to life due to the state of the internal hot water supply communications, where constant leaks and flooding force people to regularly call emergency services.
Alternative government infrastructure options, such as the neighboring buildings of the State Emergency Service, remain completely isolated from the civilian population under the pretext of a strict secrecy regime for the facilities, despite official written requests from associations of apartment building co-owners.
The persistent skepticism and mass distrust of citizens towards the simplest basement structures are regularly confirmed during inspections by the Secretariat of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine Commissioner for Human Rights throughout the country. During a monitoring visit on March 30, 2026 to a protective structure in Zaporizhia at 24 Dmytra Apukhtina Street, inspectors recorded a total violation of civil defense standards, finding the entrance door locked with a padlock. In the absence of any information signs, contacts of responsible persons, or an algorithm for obtaining keys, the group was unable to assess the internal condition of the premises in terms of ventilation efficiency, availability of drinking water, and minimum sanitary conditions. A similar picture was recorded by experts in Mykolaiv, where an inspection of the fund of the simplest storage facilities revealed that the premises, which are listed in official registers as operating around the clock, are actually used by janitors and utility services as warehouses for auxiliary equipment.
In terms of regional scale, the worst dynamics was demonstrated by the Lviv region, which led the anti-rating in terms of the share of completely unusable and non-functioning civil defense facilities among all 7,473 structures on its balance sheet. The lion’s share of this fund is made up of primitive basements with a minimal level of durability, while the number of reliable anti-radiation and specialized storage facilities remains critically small.
Analytical reports attribute this failure to long-term emergency repairs and outright falsification of data on the ground, while the Lviv region has shown zero efficiency in implementing orders from central authorities to eliminate identified defects as of the beginning of 2026. Instead of actually financing the modernization of storage facilities, local authorities are trying to shift the entire financial burden onto the shoulders of condominiums, forcing residents to repair communal basements at their own expense, but instead of monetary compensation, subjecting them to further bureaucratic checks.
When shelter exists only in the report: the mechanics of systemic fraud
The gap between the astronomical amount of billions of hryvnias allocated and the catastrophic 7% of the actual readiness of protective structures, officially recorded by the Ombudsman’s Office, demonstrates systemic institutional disorder and coordinated laundering of public money. Monitoring of public procurement in the Prozorro system clearly reveals the algorithms by which the security budget is transformed into private capital instead of reliable walls.
The most common tool for simulating security has become the disguise of capital engineering works under a banal visual renovation. Huge resources are directed to the decorative decoration of basement rooms, where laying expensive ceramic tiles, leveling walls with plaster and cosmetic renovation of electrical networks at an artificially inflated cost replace real protection. At the same time, basic life-support units, including the installation of certified filter-ventilation equipment and the penetration of mandatory additional evacuation exits, are simply not included in the estimate.
This problem is complicated by chronic “nepotism” in the distribution of orders, when strategic contracts for the construction of complex underground schools and technological facilities in the immediate vicinity of the front line are awarded to one-day firms or enterprises with a clear chain of ties to regional officials, which naturally leads to disruption of deadlines and the preservation of unfinished buildings. The situation is finally driven into a dead end by regulatory chaos in the issue of ownership, since the mass transfer of protective structures to commercial managers, departments or associations of co-owners of apartment buildings (OSBB) has created a large-scale zone of collective irresponsibility. Current legislation provides only symbolic administrative penalties for doors blocked during bombings, and a clear legal tool for the rapid rejection of such areas in favor of local communities has not yet been formed.
The greatest irony and at the same time tragedy of the situation is that the state still attributes the “human factor” as a key element of the security of millions of people. Risk management, which relies on the responsibility of the night watchman, the commandant or the tired technical staff, is a direct evidence of institutional suicide. When ballistics fly for a few minutes, any lock on the door of the shelter automatically turns this structure into a trap. It is worth changing the person to the lock systems of shelters, which should be directly integrated with the nationwide notification network of the State Emergency Service. When the siren is turned on, the current on the magnetic locks disappears, and the servo drives open the doors. In this case, access to the rescue is carried out automatically.
The same logic of systemic self-deception is also traced in official statistics, which proudly operates a significant number of protective structures. But it is obvious that a significant part of this array exists only in reports for ticks. In reality, these numbers often hide basements flooded with sewage, closets cluttered with private junk, or simply abandoned premises, where to run during shelling is a fatal logistical mistake. Ukraine needs a ruthless digital purge. Instead of interested local government officials who come up with beautiful numbers, the audit should be conducted by independent technical inspectors.
Everything that does not meet the strict standard of survival should be erased from interactive maps so as not to disorient people. A live, real database of storage facilities should be transferred to “Diya” so that everyone can be informed about the location of storage facilities in the nearest place. If a user sees a closed door or lack of ventilation, he should send a photo and a complaint in one click, which automatically starts the legal flywheel, and does not disappear in bureaucratic corridors.
However, digital tools will not work without legal inevitability. As long as the balance sheet holders and the government officials responsible for civil defense are punished with symbolic reprimands or administrative fines, the shelters will remain closed. When a person dies on the threshold of a closed bomb shelter during an attack, this cannot be qualified as “official negligence” or a minor misconduct. The responsible person must clearly realize that a closed basement during an alarm is equivalent to a real prison term without the right to parole or bail. Only such a level of personal fear can overcome systemic indifference.
The true resilience of a state is measured not by the number of nominal points on an interactive map of shelters, but by the ability to protect a citizen in the most critical moments. Maintaining the current state of affairs means tacit consent to the fact that the right to salvation will continue to depend on chance.
